Sunday, May 29, 2016

Ever Noticed Why The Letter Q Is Almost Always Followed By U? This Will Surprise You

We dare you to pick up any common English word that starts with ‘q’ and does not go with the letter ‘u’ next to it. Could you find it? Oh BTW, Hindi or any other foreign language does not count!

Be it quick, quiet, queen, quack or even Harry Potter’s favourite game Quidditch, you would be surprised to know that the letters ‘Q’ and ‘U’ almost always go together. There are hardly a few words that don’t begin with ‘qu’. In fact, did you know that the letter ‘q’ wasn’t even a part of the English language? Yeah, you heard that right.

You can thank French for the alphabet ‘q’! It was actually the Normans who introduced a lot of French words in the English vocabulary. So before the Norman invasion of 1066, English language didn’t have the letter ‘q’. In fact, instead of ‘qu’ English language used ‘cw’, due to which, words like ‘queen’ and ‘quick’ were spelt as ‘cwen’ and ‘cwic’.

Surprisingly, the Normans also changed the spelling of English words according to their French ways. If this wasn’t confusing enough, we tried to figure out why did the French use ‘q’ for the ‘k’ sound. Well, they used ‘q’ because Latin used a ‘qu’ to make the ‘kw’ sound. What’s more, it’s like a never-ending cycle because the Romans got their writing system from the Etruscans, who had 3 different symbols for the ‘k’ sound – Gamma, Kappa and Koppa. Woah! So, apparently, Gamma is supposedly the ancestor of letters C and G, Kappa is the ancestor of K and Koppa is the ancestor of Q. Who knew that even the alphabet had ancestors!

The roots of the pair ‘qu’ can’t be traced to a particular date, but even after so many decades and innumerable language transitions, these two letters stand strong together and one can hardly imagine a common word that does not have ‘qu’ together.